About Athena Advisory | Advice by Athena

Founder

Brian Cosmano

Brian Cosmano is the founder and chief executive of Athena Advisory Inc, which he started in Austin in 2021. He is also chief compliance officer of Athena Advisory RIA, LLC. The company is bootstrapped. He works from Austin.

From 2015 to 2020 he was Chief Innovation Officer at Empower Retirement. He owned product strategy for managed accounts, personalized target dates, and the experience plan participants used. In 2016 he originated the Dual QDIA in Empower and Great-West Investments’ paper In Search of a More Dynamic QDIA. The paper argued that a plan did not have to pick only a target-date fund or only a managed account as its default. Younger savers could start in a target-date fund, then move automatically into a managed account at a set age, still inside the QDIA safe harbor from the Pension Protection Act of 2006. The industry now calls that structure Dual QDIA, Dynamic QDIA, or a hybrid QDIA.

Empower shipped the first product of that type, Dynamic Retirement Manager, and other recordkeepers later built the same two-stage default, including Fidelity, Schwab, Principal, and Voya. Plan consultants now treat Dual QDIA as a standard option, not a one-off. Brian’s paper is the document that named the problem and the design those products follow. In 2018 he was an author of Empower Institute’s Made to Measure, which set out how to value a retirement managed account beyond a simple return comparison to a target-date fund.

Before Empower he worked in Morningstar Investment Management, including Ibbotson Associates and advisory platform operations, and at Dimensional Fund Advisors on a personalized target-income offering. He is the sole inventor on multiple U.S. design patents for planning interfaces, a named inventor on Empower planning and outcome-prediction patents, and a named inventor on U.S. Patent 11,748,814, a planning engine for a financial planning system. He has a B.A. in Finance from Truman State University and an M.S. in Computer Science from DePaul University. LIMRA named him a Rising Star Under 40.

Advisors

Peng Chen and Shlomo Benartzi advise the company.

Peng Chen

Peng Chen, Ph.D., CFA, started at Ibbotson Associates in 1997 in research and later became president and chief investment officer. After Morningstar acquired Ibbotson in 2006, he led Morningstar’s global investment management division, including consulting, retirement advice, and investment management in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

In 2012 he became the founding chief executive of Dimensional Fund Advisors’ Asia business, excluding Japan. He opened the Singapore and Hong Kong offices, sat on Dimensional’s Investment Policy Committee, and chaired the global defined contribution committee. He is senior advisor and director at Providend, a wealth advisory firm in Singapore. He has served on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal and received Graham and Dodd Scroll awards. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in consumer economics from Ohio State and a B.S. from the Harbin Institute of Technology.

Shlomo Benartzi

Shlomo Benartzi is professor emeritus of behavioral decision making at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a co-founder of its Behavioral Decision-Making Group. He is a distinguished senior fellow at the Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative. He earned a Ph.D. from Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and a B.A. in economics from Tel Aviv University.

With Richard Thaler he created Save More Tomorrow, the program that asks people to raise their savings rate when they get a raise. Their research found savings rates rising from 3.5 percent to 13.6 percent. The idea is now in more than half of large U.S. retirement plans and was written into the Pension Protection Act of 2006.

Published numbers

These are the figures Athena publishes about the platform.

500K+

end-user accounts on the platform
$7B+

in assets under contract
99.999%

historical uptime
50K+

AI conversations with end users

Company

Athena Advisory Inc is based in Austin, Texas.

The legal name is Athena Advisory Inc. Email is contact@advicebyathena.com. The company page on LinkedIn is Athena Advisory Inc. Charles Schwab is the custodial connection. Mission Control is the household CRM. The platform is SOC 2 Type II and runs on AWS. Security questionnaires are on Security.